Twitter hides official White House tweet for 'glorifying violence' after sharing Trump's post
Donald Trump tweeted about the Minneapolis riots saying 'when the looting starts, the shooting starts', which Twitter took action against
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Your support makes all the difference.Twitter has added the same label it added to Donald Trump’s tweet about the Minneapolis riots to a tweet from the official White House account, which posted the same message.
On Friday, Mr Trump tweeted: “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”
A police officer knelt on the neck of Mr Floyd, who repeatedly shouted that he couldn’t breathe. Mr Floyd died later that day, after an ambulance was called, and protests erupted with demonstrators calling for an end to police brutality against black people in the US.
Twitter added a warning label to that tweet, blocking it from view unless users hit a button to see the post, which has resulted in Mr Trump threatening to change Section 230: a piece of American legislation that legally protects social media sites from content posted by users.
The official White House account since tweeted the same message, and Twitter put the tweet behind the same label.
The White House also stated that Mr Trump “did not glorify violence [but] clearly condemned it”, calling Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and other employees as “biased, bad-faith ‘fact-checkers’” and said that “Twitter is a publisher, not a platform.”
The account also posted an image of a tweet sent by Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran. “Twitter has determined that it will allow terrorists, dictators, and foreign propagandists to abuse its platform,” the account claimed.
The inciting incident for these events was Twitter adding a fact-check label to one of Mr Trump’s other tweets, which claimed that mail-in voting would result in election fraud. This claim has been contested, as cases of voter fraud in the US are miniscule.
Mr Trump has been criticised in the past for using his official accounts, @POTUS and @WhiteHouse, which are funded by taxpayers, to promote his own messages, attack his political opponents such as Democratic Senator Kamala Harris, or block users that have criticised him.
This has resulted in lawsuits in the past as a US government official cannot block users on channels used to interact with the public because of the First Amendment. While the First Amendment does not apply to private companies, it was ruled that Mr. Trump’s account amounted to a public forum or a “digital town hall”.
Questions have been raised about whether the Trump administration breaches ethics rules by using a White House Twitter feed for partisan attacks; nevertheless, the president has continued to use the accounts in this way.
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